Artist Bwana Spoons has a one day exhibition of paintings he made of Star Wars characters. Well, to be precise, paintings of Star Wars action figures. That's pretty geeky. The flyer has his painting of Ackbar on it, looking all Ackbar-ry.

It's one of those Pub Quiz facts: how many times can Doctor Who regenerate? The answer, from 1976 to yesterday was twelve. From today it's infinity. The Guardian has news of how this little retcon will be slipped into The Sarah Jane Adventures as a passing remark from The Doctor.

I can't quite decide whether this is RTD annoying fans, pleasing fans, or just a non-story. They were never going to stick to an arbitrary number that a writer in 1976 came up with were they?

Tonight on BBC4 at 9pm is Mark Gatiss's adaptation of HG Wells' story The First Men In The Moon. The trailer looks pretty good, very styled and witty with Gatiss starring as well as writing the adaptation. All good. But why hidden away on BBC4? Surely this is Sunday night BBC1 fare? That's not Science Fiction aversion I see is it?

October 18, 2010

I'm really looking forward to seeing Monsters directed by Gareth Edwards when it gets released in the UK on 3rd December. I hear that it's a low budget indie alien invasion romance road movie. Sounds great to me and I wasn't disappointed by the trailer, embedded below, which looks slick and cool.

October 17, 2010

It's a story about a group of strangers who arrive in a town. They're different, but trying to fit in. The story is narrated by one of the town's children. Slowly the origins of the newcomers is revealed, actually without the title it would have taken longer to guess.

I enjoyed the story, I liked the voice of the first person narrative and I liked the slow guessing game about the newcomers. It's not a new idea, dealing with strangers and teenage isolation, but it was handled in an entertaining way that made it feel fresh. There's even the mandatory ambiguous ending, where the reader is left guessing what happened.

Enjoyable.

(And made me want to read more issues of Lightspeed Magazine, which I've been meaning to do but haven't got around to.)

October 5, 2010

The UK cover of How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe (published by Corvus) is a delightful array of small rayguns, from Flash Gordon to Star Wars. Hidden amongst the rayguns is a single dog. The font is Star Trek-y and pink. It's a lovely cover, but it lends one to think that perhaps the book is akin to The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, it really isn't.

Instead the story follows a time machine repair man, Charles Yu, who lives in his own time machine, dislocated from real time. Whatever real time is. At the beginning it feels like a Generation X story: trapped in a job, lack of social life, regrets. And yet at the same time there is weirdness intertwined, like the not real dog, and the visit to Luke Skywalker's sun, and the references to a Science Fictional universe. Also intertwined with the narrative are pages from the book How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe which provides advice and tips for a traveller. The whole things begins to feel a little recursive and odd, but enjoyably so.

I expected a fast paced plot to kick off at some point after the setup, but that doesn't happen, instead the book turns into something else: a poignant search for his father. Or rather on the surface it's a search for his father, there will be different interpretations of what the story eventually means, but I took it as a journey to let go of the past, a journey to accept and move on, to remember the good times, to lose the regret. I particularly loved memories of his childhood, and time spent with his father.

There's plenty of Science Fictional talk and enough time travel mechanics to satisfy a Primer fan, with crazy tight looped recursion, but that's all just trimmings and plot devices to get to the core emotional story. At times, mainly in the second third of the novel, I felt the story dragging, and yet even in those moments there was some beautiful language, not flowery descriptions but words of truth and wisdom. The sort of lines I wanted to cut and paste and post as my thought for the day.

The book was definitely not what I expected, but I enjoyed it and now feel the need to flick back through it and search for my favourite lines.

October 3, 2010

The Last Starfighter film stands large in the memory of my generation. Well, some of them. Those that wanted to be so good at playing an arcade game you got picked to fly a real spaceship. Awesome. And it had computer graphics! In a film!

You may have looked long and hard for that arcade machine, but it never really existed.

Until now....

Download The Last Starfighter, build a cabinet to put it in, then wait for the call to defend The Frontier from Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. Death Blossom!

October 2, 2010

October 1, 2010

Spielberg is creating a new Science Fiction TV series called Terra Nova and has cast Shelley Conn as Elizabeth Shannon, a housewife from the year 2149 who travels back in time to the era of the dinosaurs, in order to correct mistakes that have led the human species to the brink of extinction due to pollution and overdevelopment."

It sounds a bit like Jurassic Park, but with a time travelling plot. Bring on the paradoxes!

Shelley Conn has appeared in a whole raft of UK TV series including the recent Big Brother Zombie series, Dead Set. And now she's in alledgedly the most expensive TV series ever.